INTERNET ART

The net art section of the exhibition focuses on the Internet as a collaborative, participatory medium and shared environment. Three of the projects--glasbead, OPEN_Studio, and p-Soup--are multi-user environments that allow on-line visitors to collaborate in the creation of visuals and musical sequences from remote locations. John Klima's glasbead is a multi-user musical instrument and 'toy' that enables players to exchange sound files and compose musical sequences. OPEN_Studio by Andy Deck is an on-line 'drawing board' allowing multiple users to pick colors and line shapes and collaborate in the creation of drawings. With Mark Napier's p-Soup, users can choose forms and shapes accompanied by sounds and participate in the composition of geometric designs that are a result of their interaction as well as the artwork's algorithms. In all of these projects, the artists have set parameters for the creation of the work, but the art would not exist without the user's/player's input and participation.

In different ways, Apartment by Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak, netomat™ by Maciej Wisniewski, and The Last Real Net Art Museum by Olia Lialina (with multiple other artists) all focus on the configurations and reconfigurations of information and narratives. Apartment invites users to type in words which create rooms in a two-dimensional floorplan. This translation is not random but the result of the artists' categorization of the Thesaurus, assigning specific words to a specific room (the word 'book,' for example, creates a library). Users' apartments are clustered into cities according to themes and topics, transcending the meaning of each singular apartment in a larger, relational semantic structure. Netomat™ creates a different form of relational interplay: it is an alternative browser that doesn't interpret the Net as static web pages but as one huge database of information. In response to keywords typed in by the users, netomat™ streams related text, imagery and sound to the screen, and creates the impression of an infinite datascape. The Last Real Net Art Museum takes yet another approach to the subject by providing an archive of artists' variations on Olia Lialina's project My Boyfriend Came Back From The War, which each of the artists reinterprets through the use of different technologies.

In its own distinctive way, each of the projects uses the prominent characteristics of the Internet--an open system and participatory medium that allows for seemingly endless reconfigurations of data--and makes its unique statement on "network culture."

Introduction- Exhibition - Opening& InternetConference - Essays - Press- Contact - Russian Version
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